SIMPL™ offers an Opinion Survey Module to help you get a quantitative handle on some otherwise hard to get at areas. We provide a group of eight canned surveys as part of the package. You can use these directly or modify them as you see fit to conform with your specific needs. Further, you can design, create, and publish your own surveys. For each survey statement you supply a primary focus and a secondary focus to assist in the analysis. You can even set your own demographic parameters as appropriate to your survey population. When your survey is ready, you provide an email list of potential survey respondents and a cover story (we’ll supply a model cover letter or two on request) and let-her-rip. Your respondents can take the survey online or you can opt to allow them to fill in a paper form which can be entered into the online data. Because these SIMPL™ Opinion Surveys are locally focused, to the point, and obviously dealing with issues that are of immediate concern to the polled group, we have come to expect response rates that approach 70% in the first couple of hours, and nearly 95% in the first full day of a the survey. Even so, you’ll need to hold off publishing the results for a day or two to allow for late responders and for collecting responses from those who prefer to reply on paper.
So, forget what you have learned over the years about surveys and survey techniques — these are not months long affairs. They are quick striking, to the heart of the matter, and yield almost instant results. Remember, on these surveys, you are not interested in national averages — you want to know what your people think, and even though you may not be a professional analyst, you know what to your organization is an acceptable response to statements such as:
“I feel safe in my classroom,” or
“I really like my job,” or
“Our library has a great collection of classic literature,” or
“I have come to expect that our school buses will always be on schedule, never early, and never late,” etc.
It’s even fun using SIMPL™ Opinion Survey graphing and analysis tools to watch the data build in real time and to see patterns start to emerge in the data. You will come to treasure this service and will use it over and over during the year to assess organizational functions and identify areas that are critically in need of improvement. Remember, it’s your survey module — it costs you nothing to run it — the information returned is timely, and is critically important to your operations.
